16-year-old Putnam murder defendant and boyfriend don't testify

BUNNELL - Jurors deciding the fate of a Putnam County teenager charged with a gruesome murder will begin deliberating today without direct testimony from the girl or her adult boyfriend.

Instead, the Flagler County jury heard two hours Wednesday of Morgan Leppert's taped statements to investigators after she and Toby Lowry were caught in Texas last year with the victim's pickup truck.

The interviews, conducted May 3 and May 5 in El Paso, focus on Leppert's status as a 15-year-old runaway, the subject of a nationwide Amber Alert and her involvement in the beating, stabbing and suffocation of a disabled Melrose man in his home. The tapes show two sides to Leppert: a giggling girl who wants to go home to "Mommy" and a young woman callous enough to tell investigators the victim "deserved what he got."

Asked if she should be held responsible for his death, the school dropout replied tearfully: "No. I don't want to. I want to go home and stay home."

Leppert admitted hitting James Stewart, 66, a few times with aluminum curtain rods and "poking" him with a knife, not even breaking the skin. She said Lowery, 23, repeatedly stabbed and beat Steward and tied a plastic bag around his head to suffocate him, the ultimate cause of his death.

"Toby did all of it. Toby made sure he was dead," Leppert told detectives. "I told him I had to get out [of Florida], and he said he was going to do whatever he had to to be with me, and he took it too far. … I didn't want to leave Toby."

She said Stewart was killed because the couple wanted to steal his truck.

Lowry pleaded guilty in January to first-degree murder to avoid a possible death sentence. He agreed to testify at Leppert's trial and was available Wednesday but neither prosecutors nor her lawyer called him. He is serving a mandatory life prison sentence.

Leppert followed her lawyer's advice not to testify, a tactical decision defense attorney Christopher Smith said preserves her right to appeal the admission of her taped statements.

Smith called no witnesses on Leppert's behalf but argued throughout the three-day trial she was under Lowry's control.

Leppert, now 16, is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, robbery and burglary. She faces a mandatory life prison sentence if convicted as charged, but her statements to police showed little understanding of those potential consequences.

"I bet Toby's getting put away for a long time," she told investigators. "I was thinking I was going to get house arrest or probation or something like that."

In fact, after a tearful confession and consenting to give DNA samples, she returned to joking with one detective about his "old-fashioned" beeper.

Stewart's family wept as they listened to the audiotaped confession. At one point, Leppert said Stewart deserved to die because she thought he was a pervert. She later admitted she had no basis for that opinion.

She also told investigators Steward begged for his life.

"He said why are you all going to kill me. I'm half-dead anyway," she said. "I just looked away. I was about to cry."

She said Lowry then told her: "Come on, Baby. Hit him. Hit him."

In the earlier interview, conducted May 3, 2008, she denied any knowledge of Stewart when shown his photograph. She told an investigator Lowry showed up with the truck the night she ran away from her San Mateo home, and she didn't know where he got it.

But that story began to unravel when she couldn't explain what they did with the vehicle before leaving Putnam County and why they slept in woods near Stewart's home instead of in the truck. And as detectives caught her up in lies, she turned serious.

"It went from a cute, young, innocent schoolgirl to a person … who came off as an adult," said State Attorney's Office investigator Christopher Middleton, who participated in both interviews.

"She didn't act the child part, which she did on the 3rd. She acted like she was fully aware of what was going on."

paul.pinkham@jacksonville.com,(904) 359-4107

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